


Secrets, Mind Games, and Lies

by completelyhopeless



Series: Detective Grayson and Forensic Batgirl [14]
Category: DCU
Genre: Alternate Universe, Case Fic, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-25
Updated: 2015-01-25
Packaged: 2018-03-08 23:23:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3227363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/completelyhopeless/pseuds/completelyhopeless
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dick finds Jason in mob territory, Barbara deals with the fallout of Dick leaving a second time. Bruce's secrets and Maroni's mind games cause everyone trouble.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Secrets, Mind Games, and Lies

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly, I wasn't expecting this. I knew that Dick and Jason were meeting up. What they found was a surprise to me. So was what Bruce pulled. I don't know where this came from or what to do with it.

* * *

“I knew I'd find you here.”

“Damn, Dick. Do you have a death wish or what?”

“Apparently I have too good a survival instinct to let that happen,” Dick said with a slight smile. It was true, which took all of the humor out of it. His ribs were screaming, the cut on his side stung, and his stomach didn't seem to want to let either of those complaints win the war.

“That's hard to believe when you're out here again after the last time Maroni got close to you,” Jason muttered, putting the safety back on. “You look like hell.”

“I'm doing better, actually.” Dick leaned against the brick, looking at the building below them. He had been here before, many long nights in rain and even snow, watching over the same men Jason had found today. He didn't know why Jason hadn't killed them, but a part of him was glad he hadn't. The rest of him was worried. “And despite what happened last time, I managed to do enough damage to Maroni to somehow save Damian's life and earn myself a blood debt from the kid.”

“How?”

“I'm not sure. I only remember part of it. I think Maroni drugged my car's air freshener. That stuff... Whatever it is, it screws with my head good. There's things I haven't gotten back in almost twenty years now.”

Jason nodded. “Hate that crap.”

“It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't leave behind a bunch of patches. I would rather not remember any of it than remember what I do,” Dick said, trying not to think about his parents or anything else to do with Maroni right now. “The pieces I have make me wonder what I could have done—”

“That's your problem, you know. You assume that whatever you did that you can't remember is worse than what you've done.” Jason said. Then he shrugged. “What I did can't be anything worse than what I know I did.”

“That wasn't you,” Dick insisted. He knew that Jason hadn't wanted to hurt him, and he knew that despite the threats and the programming, Jason wasn't a killer at heart. A protector, defender, and an angry kid with a chip on his shoulder, sure, yes. Murderer, no. He let out a breath. “You haven't moved against them. Why not?”

“Still haven't seen Maroni. He's the one I want dead. The others probably deserve it, but I'm not letting Maroni get away again. Not this time. It ends now. He's going to tell the truth about what he did to your parents, and then he's gonna die.”

“Babs proved that I didn't kill them. She has all the forensics back at her lab. She still has tests to do, but most of the evidence is clear even without a bunch of fancy tests—an adult killed them. It wasn't me.”

“Could have told you that.”

“You weren't there,” Dick reminded him, giving up on the idea of keeping Jason out of this for his own good. He was going to have to stick close and make sure Jason didn't get hurt or end up killing anyone. “You left before Babs even told me about Damian's accusation.”

“Because it was crap and we both knew it,” Jason said. “If I hadn't left, I would have killed that kid. I still want to—that brat is nothing but a pain. I don't care if he gave you a name—he lied about everything and tried to kill you and your girlfriend and me.”

“What little I did get from Damian fits with what I learned from Selina.” Dick rubbed the back of his neck, needing something for the pain again. He wasn't about to ask Jason for anything, though. “She said that the mob was importing things that weren't their style—including the type of Persian rugs that would have the fibers from the crime scene.”

Jason snorted. “You don't mean to tell me we were right all along about the mob being behind what happened to us? I thought we said that was stupid.”

“It is. And it isn't. You thought Maroni would be here. I found you here. Worth it, at least a little.”

Jason rolled his eyes, but Dick could see he was close to smiling.

* * *

“You let him go?”

Barbara folded her arms over her chest. “What was I supposed to do, dropkick him and hogtie him to keep him here? I'm getting a little tired of all of you assuming I'm going to clean up your messes. That is not happening. I am not a babysitter, not a nurse, and definitely not a maid.”

Bruce caught hold of Damian before the boy could rush forward to attack her. “Barbara, Dick is injured and traumatized. He's not thinking clearly. He should never have left.”

“I am not disagreeing with you,” she said. _I'm just kicking myself for not seeing that damn kiss for what it was—a distraction._ She should have known better, even with the way Dick had been flirting with her. She'd known that he was going to kiss her, but she'd figured it was real, that he was taking everything too far, reading too much into their friendship and proximity.

He'd tricked her, and that pissed her off.

“Dick is gone, again. We have no idea where he is. Where Jason is. Last time Dick was on his own, he was taken by Maroni and almost killed,” Bruce said. “We need to find him. Now.”

“I never said that I didn't know where he went.” Barbara almost laughed, but none of this was funny. “He told me that he and Jason had a theory about Maroni's connection to the mob. I'm betting they're deep in Maroni family territory right now.”

“With Dick injured and Jason unstable. They're going to get themselves killed.”

She couldn't disagree with that. She was starting to think she needed to put some kind of tracker on Dick so she could keep an eye on him. It would be easier if he didn't disable his phone's GPS all the time, but with Bruce as a father always looking over his shoulder, she didn't entirely blame Dick for being so evasive.

“Tell me where he is.”

She did laugh when she heard that from Damian. “You don't get to give me orders. Even if I knew more specifically where Dick was, I wouldn't tell you. You're a child.”

“I could kill you.”

“You could try, but I didn't grow up the daughter of a cop and learn nothing about how to protect myself. I wasn't brainwashed into an assassin, but I had a father who refused to let me become a victim. He lost my mother. He wasn't about to lose me,” she said, folding her arms over her chest. She looked over the boy's head to Bruce. “Your fiber matched the one from Dick's first crime scene. Same type of fabric, likely the same designer suit. Did that come from Maroni?”

“No.”

She frowned. “Wait. What do you mean it didn't come from Maroni? Who else have you been tracking that you're not telling us about?”

“Dick's theory about the mob isn't new,” Bruce said. “He looked into it years ago, initially believing that his parents were killed in a mob ordered hit because of Maroni's rumored ties to the family. He never could prove the ties, but it did lead to him finding Jason.”

Barbara let out a breath. “Damn it, Bruce, are you telling me now that Jason's father is mob and that he's involved in this?”

“Todd is a low level flunky, but yes. He is. He has been for years. He was supposedly killed when Dent made a play to eliminate Thorne, but about a year or so, I found out he'd resurfaced. New name, new suit, same blood on his hands.”

“Jason and Dick don't know about this, do they?” Barbara asked. She shook her head. “Do you have any idea what you've done, keeping this from them? They'll be blindsided by it, and if Jason ends up killing his father—I don't care what kind of monster he is—it'll mess with his mind even more than it already has been. And—Oh, hell. You had Tim taking pictures of this guy, didn't you? That's how he ended up photographing Kowlinski. He was meeting with Todd, wasn't he?”

Bruce grunted. Barbara felt like screaming in frustration. She forced herself to stay calm. “We need to go have another conversation with Kowlinski.”

“I will go.”

“No,” she said, glaring at Bruce. “I trusted you years ago when you found my mother's killer, but I don't trust you now. I won't let you shut me out of the investigation like you did Dick and Jason. No wonder he left you. If you were doing this to Dick back then, before he was a cop, I don't blame him for telling you to shove it and going his own way. He's a good cop, a good investigator, and he can handle a lot more than you think. You're not protecting him. You're just being selfish.”

“You don't know—”

“I am going with you to talk to my father and Kowlinski,” she said. Bruce would not talk her out of this. She grabbed her keys and then stopped. “Where's Damian?”

* * *

“Well,” Dick said, looking down at the body on the floor. “That was kind of anti-climatic.”

“Just a little,” Jason agreed, kicking the man's leg with his foot. “We manage to sneak in past a bunch of mob thugs, make it inside the building, and the first door, we find this. I'm disappointed. I planned on killing him myself. Making him suffer.”

Dick grimaced. Torture was too far, even for a couple of messed up pseudo-assassins. “You wouldn't have done that. You'd just have shot him—after he talked.”

“Come on, Dick. After all this bastard did to you, he got off way too easy.”

“I don't think he did,” Dick said, ignoring the pain to kneel down by Maroni's body. “Look at this. That wasn't me. Wasn't Damian. His sword did this here, that there, and I gave Maroni these bruises, but even the cut on his leg wasn't fatal. Someone brought him here and tortured him—you can see the marks of electrocution there and there—and these cuts here were meant to hurt but not to kill—the bullet in the head came after whoever did this got the answers he wanted.”

Jason grunted. “Ignoring the fact that you're lecturing me like you did when I played junior detective to you, it hasn't been that long since we dragged your sorry ass out of that mess. No one broke Maroni in over twenty years. How'd these people do it so fast?”

“I'm guessing this is the overseas connection, and whoever sent Damian here to inspect the operation was very angry about what Maroni tried to do to his kid. That would be the second interrogator. The first—the one who used electrocution—he was kind of sloppy. The second was focused, practiced, and right out of a spy movie where they know that death of a thousand cuts or whatever it is,” Dick said, groaning as he got back to his feet. Jason frowned at him, but he shook his head. “I'm not going to pass out. Not even going to lose my lunch this time. Not that I ate it. Again.”

Jason gave the body another kick. “If you could eat after that, I'd be worried about you.”

“Ha. You don't worry about me. You barely tolerate me.”

Jason grinned. “True.”

“I think we better get back to the others,” Dick said, looking at Maroni's body again. “I think our second interrogator might have wanted to know where Damian is.”

“So now we have this foreign connection coming down on our asses. Awesome.”

“I warned you,” Dick reminded him. “I told you to stay away from this. You were the one that came back. You knew better.”

“Yeah, well, you seem to forget that you're the biggest target in all of this.”

“I am not.”

“You're the one that got away. You escaped from Maroni, somehow overcame the programming, found me and then got close enough to Maroni's operation to force him to flee the country for years. You're the one they really want.”

“I'm not,” Dick said, grabbing hold of Jason's arm and squeezing it, trying to tell him without words to shut up even as he struggled not to give into the memories about to force their way back into his mind. “Need to get out of here. Now.”

“I'm afraid you're not going anywhere, Mr. Grayson. Our little 'Robin' has been out of the nest for far too long.”

* * *

“He's a kid. He shouldn't have gotten that far.”

Barbara looked at Bruce. “You raised Dick. How can you say that? Dick was solving cases for you when he was ten. Damian is a trained assassin. He could be anywhere by now. We shouldn't have been so distracted.”

“You're going to blame me for this?”

She wanted to, but her anger at him didn't excuse her inattention. She shouldn't have missed Damian sneaking out, either. “Blaming each other doesn't help anyone or anything. We need to talk to my father and Kowlinski and get what answers we can from him. They may help us find Damian, Dick, and Jason.”

“Finding Jason won't be hard. All you have to do is listen for the sirens.”

“Yeah, and that's why you found him so easily in the last five—or is it ten?—years,” she muttered, digging out her keys. “Jason may be unstable, but he's not stupid. He knows how to hide and he is loyal, in his way. He came back for Dick, and I believe he would do anything he thought necessary to protect him. That doesn't make him the sort of lunatic that advertises his crime on the evening news. He can be subtle.”

Bruce nodded. “It might be possible to cut the middle man and go straight to Todd. He might have more of the answers we want.”

“Talking to him could tip our hand.”

“You're not a half-bad detective.”

She sighed. “Just because I chose to work in the lab and behind the scenes doesn't make me any less capable of doing the work. I'm a policeman's daughter. I know how to think like a detective, but I also know how much the world of criminal investigation has changed. Nowadays you need things like DNA and forensics to get much of anywhere. Cyber crimes are at all time high as well, and those would have been impossible a few decades ago. It's not just shoe leather that gets things done, though I do have respect for those who do that work. It's stupid that it doesn't go both ways.”

“It does for some people.”

“You mean Dick.”

Bruce looked at her. “You don't think he's different?”

She wasn't disagreeing with that. Dick was different. She was still angry about the kiss, but that didn't mean she thought Dick was a bad cop or one who took her work for granted. He wasn't. He didn't. Even if all she got from him was a lousy take-out meal, he always made sure she knew he appreciated what she'd done for him.

She took out her phone. “Dad, it's me. Ask Kowlinski where Todd is. Tell him to answer fast.”

* * *

“I am not and never was your Robin,” Dick said. He was sick of everyone calling him that, twisting the name his mother had given him. “In case you didn't notice, the mind control never worked on me. I never worked for you.”

“You did more for us than you know,” Sinisi, the current head of the Maroni family said, taking out a cigar and lighting it. “Zucco always insisted that his failure was not a failure, and I thought he was a fool, but it is true—he learned much from you. What worked, what did not, how to break a mind and rebuild it—”

“My mind is not broken,” Dick said. “And your system is still flawed. It didn't work on me, on Jason, or Damian.”

That got a reaction out of one of the others, a slight flicker in an otherwise impassive face, and Dick figured him for the second interrogator, the one connected to Damian.

“I know him.”

“Sinisi is the head of the Maroni crime family. Everyone knows him,” Dick muttered, not knowing why Jason was doing this now. They couldn't afford to have side conversations when Sinisi, his lieutenant, and the man he assumed represented the overseas interests were standing in front of them, ready to order their deaths.

“No, I _know him,”_ Jason said, nudging Dick so that he focused on the man next to Sinisi, the one in the suit. “That's my father.”

Dick felt like he was in a bad rip off of some movie, though if he was, it would have been Maroni, alive, saying that to him and not Jason's presumed dead in a mob war father standing next to the current head of the family as a trusted lieutenant. He didn't want to say it, but it explained something he'd wondered about for years—why Jason? And the answer was simple: his own father had betrayed him.

That was not what happened to Dick, though. He refused to believe that.

“Now is really not a good time for reunions.”

“There is one that had better take place if either of you expects to live,” the third man said, and Dick decided this guy was either sent by or al Ghul himself. “Where is Damian?”

“At the moment, I don't know, and I don't think you'd let me live even if I did know.”

“That is, unfortunately, not true,” al Ghul said. “It would seem that in his failure, Zucco created a side effect that he kept from both his former employers and his current associates. The methods he used to influence the minds of his later subjects created in them a vulnerability to suggestions given by you.”

“What? That's not...” Dick swallowed, trying to shut out the thoughts in his head as well as the voice of Maroni from his memories. He knew he'd been able to talk Jason out of killing in the past, and he knew he'd somehow earned a life debt from Damian, but that did not mean he could control either of them. “That's just something Maroni told you to save his ass because he knew you'd go after him for trying to kill Damian. It's not true.”

“Dick, you really are stupid. You know if they believed you could control all of their killers, they'd let you live.”

_“You always were special, Robin. Now we're making you even more than you were before.”_

Dick gagged, shaking his head. “I think I'd rather die than be their pawn for controlling everyone else. And I'm not a big fan of being tortured. That's happened too many times for my liking.”

“Yeah, you're right,” Jason agreed. “Let's just shoot them.”


End file.
